Relationships & Partners and Writing Skills Tips. (A Writing Advice Guide Book

Lecture 13: How To Start A Plot

Lecture 13: How To Start A Plot

Getting a  plot started is a daunting prospect for most writers, but the reason it's daunting varies from writer to writer. Some writers know so much about the story even before they start that they don't quite know where to begin. Others have only a single episode or character in mind, and they're not sure how to spin that situation into a complete narrative. In this lecture, we'll explore three ways to work a writer works out plot, outlined by John Gardner: "by borrowing some traditional plot or an action from real life ... by working his way back from the story's climax; or by groping his way forward from an initial situation."

Working Out Plots
Gardner's first method of approaching plot is borrowing, but it's important to note that this is not the same as plagiarism, which generally involves passing off someone else's work as your own. Borrowing, in contrast, usually involves changing an earlier plot in significant ways or using it for a purpose that the original author may not have intended or even foreseen. Many writers, for example, have retold Homer's Odyssey, setting it in completely different contexts. Others have retold well-known stories from a different point of view.

Of course, historical novels take their stories from famous people or events in history. As with novels that adapt earlier works of literature, the best historical novels reimagine history in interesting ways. For example, Robert Graves's novel I, Claudius and Marguerite Yourcenar's The Memoirs of Hadrian each tell the story of a Roman emperor from the emperor's point of view.

Sometimes, writers borrow types of plots rather than specific stories. Beginning writers of mysteries or romance novels, for example, probably have templates for those sorts of stories in their minds. Although such a template can be a straightjacket, it can also be a convenient way to at least get a plot started, even if you plan to change it later on.

And sometimes writers borrow a plot when they need to provide a structure for the material that truly interests them. The science fiction writer William Gibson structured his first novel, Neuromancer, as an old-fashioned noir thriller in the style of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. He was interested in evoking a rich, complex, and colorful future and in playing with the cultural, social, and political implications of the computer revolution; thus, he used a thriller plot to provide a framework for this material.

Another approach to plotting is to start with the end of a story and structure the rest of the work so that it leads to a particular climax. Obviously, this method requires that you know how the story ends before you start writing. It also probably works best if you're writing a binary narrative, that is, one with an either/or conclusion.

With this type of narrative, figuring out how to start by working backward should be relatively easy: If there's a crime to be solved, you start with the crime or its immediate aftermath; if the two lovers finally get together, you need to start with their meeting or the situation that leads to their meeting.

This is the method where you're most likely to find that an outline is useful. If you already know what happens at the end, that means you know, or at least can infer, what the plot needs to do to reach that point: what characters you'll need, what the setting will be, and roughly what steps the characters need to take to get there.

Finally, many writers start with an image, a character, or a situation and, as Gardner put it, "grope" their way forward. William Faulkner famously said that he created his great novel The Sound and the Fury by starting with a single image of a little girl with muddy underpants sitting in a tree, peering through a window at a funeral. This method is probably more time-consuming and frustrating than sticking to an outline, but it may result in a more complex narrative structure.